How hard is it to just listen to music these days? Spotify has crammed in all sorts of crap in to the app lately. Lyric videos, those weird interactive art things that are turned on by default, podcasts (so many podcasts), Netflix tie-ins, and audiobooks. It wants to be the app that opens when you plug in your headphones (not that we’ll be doing that for much longer the way things are going).

Today I listened to ‘Cloudbusting’ by Kate Bush for the first time in a while. What a gloriously strange song it is. Best of all, it’s one of those songs that obscures what it is really about. It’s not a song about a change in the weather, but about Wilhelm Reich, the orgone accumulator, fluorescent yo-yos, and a son (rather than a sun) coming out. ‘Cloudbusting’ is from ‘Hounds of Love’, Kate’s ‘comeback’ album following the commercial failure of ‘The Dreaming’, an album I wrote about in my understated classics series.

I was due to have my second vaccination today, but like most people I rebooked to have it a bit earlier. No real side effects this time, save for a bit of malaise. Though that may have just been the thought of opening up the country when cases are still increasing quickly. It goes without saying that I’d urge everyone to get vaccinated and then to keep turning up for whatever boosters the people protecting us (e.

Outline is the first of a trilogy of novels by Rachel Cusk. In it, the narrator is travelling to Athens to help teach on a creative writing class. You could describe the rest of what happens in a couple of sentences. I won’t be doing so because first, that’s spoilers, and I don’t do spoilers; second, Outline is one of those novels where what happens doesn’t matter quite so much as how it all happens.

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been in need of some music that: Blots out the outside world Helps me to concentrate on my work Makes me feel a bit less anxious about the state of the world Well, allow me to submit the compilation Trance Nation for your consideration as an understated classic. But Matt I’ve heard trance music, I hear you say, and it’s one of the least understated forms of music possible.

I had my first Covid-19 vaccination on Friday. Leading up to it, I was borderline having a panic attack. From about lunchtime I was just all over the shop (the jab was at 7pm). I’m glad that the vaccination centres run with such exactitude, but also with a sense of cheeriness. By the time I’d had the jab, I was feeling much better just from the sheer relief of it.

Ingrid has joined an online drawing class. She sits there on Teams getting feedback on her drawings, while I sit there attempting to absorb everything. I’m also learning by doing, by making a line on the page. In some ways, it’s instructive to observe the difference in what we learn with and without the feedback. We bought some drawing materials and nice notepads. But to be honest, I still haven’t made room in my day to draw regularly.

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

A non-exhaustive list of ideas for saving time: Delete your social media, and perhaps any other website or app that demands that you consume it rather than create with it. Another way to think of it: all these sites and apps transform your time in to one thing or another, what are the most valuable products of that time? In general, Facebook products are designed to transform your time into greater awareness of companies who would like you or your friends to buy their products.

Writing this post came about from frustration with blogging. Specifically the tools I am using. Often it feels like a new language or paradigm comes along that shifts one or two of the pain points of blogging. The biggest are: How long it takes to get a post on the internet once you’ve written it The reliability of the resulting website How good the resulting website looks Note that none of this really impacts the quality of the writing.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a short novella about two members of opposing factions (Red and Blue) engaged in a ’time war’: that is they travel in time and attempt to erase each other’s existence. Except that one day Red decides to taunt Blue with a letter, and a correspondence emerges. The book is entertaining by virtue of wit and brevity. However, the elements that are skipped over that end up being more interesting to reflect on later.

Last year I started to write a review of Italo Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller”. I read it while we were in Germany for Christmas. We’d visited Bremen and also undergone the bizarreness of Christmas in another language - the same motifs played out in different words and different customs. I’d tried to write the review in a similar structure to the book but, in a testament to Calvino’s writing I couldn’t pull it off.

“The mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.” John Cage After enjoying The Overstory, I wanted to read more of Richard Powers’ novels. Orfeo was also long listed for the Booker prize. Perhaps more of his novels would have been had the prize been opened to American authors earlier. Orfeo is about Peter Els, a seventy year old composer who accidentally alerts Homeland Security to the existence of his home laboratory, in which he has been trying to recode the genetic material of a bacterium to include a piece of his music.